David Cameron will tonight attend a meeting of the secretive Bilderberg Group, which comprises senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the globe, Downing Street has announced.

His decision to join the gathering at a country house hotel near Watford will provoke controversy as the Prime Minister once pledged to lead the world's most open and transparent government.

About 140 leaders from banking, finance and politics, as well as some members of royalty and aristocracy, will be present at the conference, which is taking place in Britain for the first time for 15 years.

The Chancellor George Osborne and Kenneth Clarke, the minister without portfolio and former Chancellor, are also on the guest-list, along with the shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls.

The Bilderberg Group has always attracted conspiracy theories as its meetings always take place in strict secrecy and no records are released of its deliberations.

Downing Street said Mr Cameron had been invited to the session as he was head of government in the conference's host country.

London - How do we know what our leaders do at Bildeberg meetings? Well, we could always write and ask them. George Osborne has replied, to a degree.
Thirty years ago they laughed at people like me. They're not laughing now. At one time it was only conspiracy theorists and right wing cranks who talked about the global manipulators. Today it's people like Michael Meacher, who has been a Labour MP since before many of you reading this were born.
I wrote to the Chancellor on May 7 asking about his reported appearance at the then forthcoming Watford Bilderberg meeting.
Wikipedia
George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Her Majesty's Treasury
Like this image1
Having received no reply by last weekend, I drafted another letter and delivered both this and a copy of the original in person to Westminster yesterday on my way to the British Library. When I got home yesterday evening I opened...the reply to my first letter.
You can read the correspondence so far here, but basically, yes, the Chancellor did attend the Bilderberg meeting as a private individual, although HM Treasury picked up the tab. Hopefully the reply to my second letter will bring a positive response to the issue of debt-free money, for why should the British Government or any government pay interest (your taxes) on something banks create out of thin air, when they can do the same thing themselves?_________________http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149
Secret Rulers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsyyBgdIZ4ghttp://www.thisweek.org.ukhttp://www.dialectradio.co.ukhttp://www.911forum.org.uk

The final cost of police operation around the Bilderberg Group meeting in Watford earlier this year was just under £1 million, Hertfordshire Constabulary has revealed.

The force announced today the final bill was £990,000 for the event, which saw luminaries from the world of business, academia and politics - including Prime Minister David Cameron - attend.

Hertfordshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, David Lloyd, has now approved a bid to the Government for a grant to help cover the costs of the operation around The Grove hotel.

The constabulary has already received a contribution of £500,000 from the Bilderberg Group, although under current legislation they are under no legal obligation to do so.

Police and Crime Commissioner David Lloyd commented: "The policing operation was highly effective and showed how well placed the force is to handle such a large-scale event. The event put Hertfordshire in the media spotlight, nationally and internationally, and the force handled it really well.

"Also key to the operation’s planning was to ensure that disruption to the local community was kept to an absolute minimum. The police planning team met with local residents before the event to address the questions and, where appropriate, adjust the policing operation accordingly. At a well-attended post-event meeting held for the local community, residents expressed their gratitude to the police for the effectiveness of the operation.

"As an event of international significance, it is right that the burden of policing costs should not fall to the people of Hertfordshire. That is why I have approved the bid to the Home Office to cover the remaining gap in the costs and I anticipate that this will bring to a close our work on a successful event."

A large-scale police operation was launched over three day secretive conference in June, which included a no-fly zone and roads around the hotel being closed with anti-terror laws.

As well as Hertfordshire’s own officers, police from the neighbouring force areas of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Thames Valley and the Metropolitan Police were present.

Officers were also drafted in from as far afield as South Yorkshire, Leicestershire, Surrey and Sussex.

During the conferences thousands of protestors congregated in the grounds of The Grove to demonstrate against the group.

The conference saw powerful politicians such as the Prime Minister, Chancellor George Osborne, shadow chancellor Ed Balls and cabinet minister Ken Clarke spending time at the exclusive venue with leading global figures.

Other figures present included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former CIA director David Petraeus. Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF as well as the heads large corporations such as Barclays, Amazon, Google and Shell.

The event is covert and no minutes of recordings of the discussions are released to the public.

A remarkable collection of politicians, diplomats, industrialists, bankers, royalty and other notables assemble in Watford today for the 61st Bilderberg meeting, a discreet high-level transatlantic policy forum that has met almost annually since 1954.

In recent years Bilderberg has taken to publishing its guest list and a brief agenda, in a bid to dispel the aura of conspiracy that has traditionally surrounded the event. (The data has been uploaded to the Bilderberg 2013 Watford page at Spinwatch's Powerbase wiki, which hopefully provides a more illuminating format than the Bilderberg site).

This publication marks a small but significant departure from Bilderberg's ethos of secrecy, intended to facilitate open discussion between participants.

At its outset in 1954, Bilderberg was intended to provide a forum to overcome emerging tensions between the United States and Western Europe, then beginning to recover from the Second World War.

Much has been made of the fact that Bilderberg's first chairman Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was a member of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, but it is arguably his role in the early 1940s, when he fled the Nazis to Britain, that is of most significance for Bilderberg. The early meetings drew on wartime links, established only a decade before between British and American intelligence, European Governments-in-exile, and resistance movements on the continent.

The emergence of the Cold War helped to perpetuate these networks and perhaps also the tradition of secrecy in which they operated. Early British delegates to Bilderberg such as Colin Gubbins and Hugh Gaitskell had close links to wartime covert action.

Scholars of the cold war are perhaps the best guide through the maze of claims and counter-claims about Bilderberg. For intelligence historian Christopher Aldrich, Bilderberg was the product of the same small group of Western officials who promoted European federalism, a project that was ironically sustained by the CIA. 'Quite simply', argues Aldrich, 'the most enthusiastic federalist power in post-war Europe was the United States.' (The Hidden Hand, 2002, p.344)

On the social significance of networks like Bilderberg, Dutch scholar Kees van der Pijl writes:

They function not as single-minded conspiracies, but as flexible, open structures in which the conflicting lines of development can be identified and synthesised. Ruling class strategists rely on these networks to elaborate a hegemonic strategy aimed at winning over intermediate strata; they can thus establish a bloc of forces committed to a comprehensive, broadly accepted concept of control. This presumes a keen appreciation of the real balance of forces, both in the geopolitical arena and in class terms. Disagreement and discussion are therefore ultimately as vital as a measure of compromise and consensus. (Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq, 2006, pp.68-69).

The British historian Hugh Wilford writes in response:

One does not have to accept all the Marxist assumptions inherent in the Dutch scholar's analysis to agree that there were striking correspondences between the Group and earlier attempts to construct a bourgeois transnational network or 'imagined community' through such élitist, secretive, male-only organisations as the Freemasons or the Rhodes/Milner 'Round Table'. That said, there is considerable explanatory force in his argument that the early Cold War witnessed the emergence of a new 'Atlantic ruling class' whose power was based on the liberal corporate order of New Deal America but which also incorporated fractions of European élites who shared its modernising internationalist outlook. (The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? 2003, pp.254-255).

Certainly, the agenda of recent meetings show a keen appreciation for the "real balance of forces" reflected in events such as the Arab Spring and anti-Austerity protests in Europe. They also demonstrate a strong interest in new technology, with 'Social Networks: Connectivity and Security Issues' on the agenda in 2011, 'cyber security' in 2012, and 'Cyber warfare and the proliferation of asymmetric threats' due to be discussed this week.

These discussions are intriguing because current and former security officials rub shoulders with tech executives like Eric Schmidt of Google. One wonders how much past Bilderberg discussions have shaped Google's foray into counter-radicalisation with its think tank Google Ideas.

Facebook investor Peter Thiel is also a regular at Bilderberg. One of Thiel's investments, the data analysis company, Palantir Technologies, is also represented by this year CEO Alex Karp at Bilderberg. Palantir is controversial for its work developing data-mining technology for US intelligence agencies, but also because it has been implicated in cyber-espionage

It is tempting to see the germ of the database state in such contacts, which are the more troubling because of the strong neoconservative presence at Bilderberg, despite its centrist image, through organisations like the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies and the American Enterprise Institute, represented once again this year by Richard Perle.

The privileged access offered by Bilderberg offers chosen industrialists the opportunity to shape debates in a number of areas. The debate 'Online education: promise and impacts', offers a golden opportunity to Andrew Y. Ng, CEO of Coursera, which specialises in just this area.

The presence of creative commons activist Lawrence Lessig is perhaps the only potential counterweight to a prevalent bias in favour of the commodification of new technology.

Particularly troubling is the strong representation of the pharmaceutical industry and companies with related investments, alongside politicians with proven clout in relation to healthcare, such as Shirley Williams, the Lib Dem peer who played a key part in persuading her party to back a Health Social care Act strengthening the role of the private sector.

We still don't know what is actually discussed at Bilderberg, but we know more than we did, and that is itself a concession by elite networked power of the 1950s to the mass networked power of the 21st century. We know enough perhaps to begin to question, and to contest, the Bilderberg agenda.

A retired police sergeant from Harpenden has been praised for his work during a high profile political event.

Mark Hill, 50, was one of four officers honoured for their hard work, commitment and bravery during the Bilderberg Group meeting in June 2013 in Watford.

The officers were part of Operation Discuss - Hertfordshire Constabulary’s response to the conference held at the Grove Hotel.

A £1 million police operation was launched for the three day secretive conference, which included a no-fly zone and roads around the hotel being closed with anti-terror laws.

The conference saw powerful politicians such as the Prime Minister, Chancellor George Osborne, shadow chancellor Ed Balls and cabinet minister Ken Clarke spending time at the exclusive venue with leading global figures.

Ultimately the event went ahead and the Constabulary was congratulated by both the event organisers and the protest groups for the policing style and innovative approaches taken.

The other officers given Chief Constable’s Commendations at an awards ceremony at Police Headquarters in Welwyn Garden City were Temporary Chief Superintendent Simon Hawkins, Temporary Chief Inspector Chris Savage and Inspector Richard Beechey.

Chief Constable Andy Bliss closed the awards by saying: "We could not hope to do this without the excellent staff and volunteers who work for us.